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Re: Math, another auxlang, hadwan numbers & stress, and regional English

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Monday, April 2, 2001, 12:48
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Muke Tever wrote:

> > From: Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> > > Subject: Re: Verb order in Montreiano > > > > (Conlangs as educational impetus toward learning real-life langs so you > > can understand where the conlangs are coming from! Too bad I'm not going > > into foreign-language education or I could use conlang stuff. I'm at a > > loss as to how one to incorporate conlangs into math classes.) > > This reminds me of something I read in a book on an auxlang (Ehmayghee chah, > I believe it is) I got from yon library. (This appears on the back cover. > The whole setup looks like something out of the fifties, but it's dated > 1992...)
[snip]
> Now, doesn't that make you just want to run out and do your own conlang's > math system better? He says elsewhere that the number system is so great, > that especially people who work with "foreign telephone operators" would > find it very useful; this leads me to believe he is from another planet, > where they have magic lossless phones. (Three times at least every day I > have to deal with people calling the lab and asking for '*garble*cia?' or > somesuch...)
ROTFL! Yeah, there would be that slight problem....
> > But seeing this made me want to ask: In what order do people like to > > settle on grammatical features (whether or not said features are later > > revised)? I confess I've gone roughly from _Describing Morphosyntax_ and > > Rosenfeld's Language Construction Kit: deciding on > > agglutinating/isolating/whatever, basic word order, deciding whether > > adjectives are verblike or nounlike or both or neither, etc. (Which is > > why I double-took when I saw your message, because word order is > > something I decide on really early.) But my eyes have been opened to the > > possibility of other ways of doing things. :-) Enlighten me? > > I personally generally discover these things as I need them. That is, I > don't set out to fix all the little points of grammar (as I do, and probably > shouldn't, with vocabulary, say) but rather I discover rules as the > language's tendencies dictate. Er, yeah.
I didn't expect to get a list or anything so definite. :-) Even with the "guides" I cited, I go around doing things in a haphazard, "I feel like working on X today" fashion. OC, this was when I last had time to work on conlanging, period. <sigh> [snip]
> This is one reason why English people speaking Spanish words can sound funny > even if they have all the actual phonemes right. Or vice versa. One of our > teachers (from Mexico, I think) was talking about a ['dO.n@t], and had > trouble getting understood until someone picked it up ('donut')... and he's > like "that's what I said, you want I should say ['dO::::w.n@t]?"
<laugh> Yeah--Americans speaking Korean sound funny sometimes because they're stress-accenting what should be pitch-accented. Not that stress doesn't vary in Korean, but it strikes me as more on an emotional vector (Koreans can yell a lot!).
> > How have other people handled stress/accent?
> With great evil. >:) Nah, stress in Hadwan is predictable for the most > part. I don't know quite _how_ to vocalize the rules for it yet, but > they're there and they're pretty regular.
<choke/g>
> ER, okay, well, the 'generic' stress on a word is placed on the last > syllable of the root, or on the first suffix. However, most suffixes cause > the stress to fall towards them *anyway*, and in some words the stress is > 'fixed', which basically means the stress fell and doesn't have an > opportunity in its whole declension to go back.
Interesting. :-)
> Foreign stress rules always confuse me, though. I'm used to assigning > Latinate stress to unfamiliar words, which gets you basically nowhere > reading, oh, Greek or Russian or pretty much anything that isn't Romance > itself. I had a question, and I forgot it.
<wry g> I have this bad feeling that I'm going to end up unconsciously pitch-accenting any language like Latin that has phonemic vowel length distinctions, because I "hear" the longer vowels as being stressed, and so I raise the pitch of the stressed syllable (whether or not it's long itself) so I have *something* to work with. YHL